It would be carved into the children’s store of memories forever. In Lawn, on the boot of the Burin Peninsula, as the evening of Monday, November 18 drew in, six-year-old Anna Tarrant lay on a day bed in her family’s kitchen, suffering from a sore throat. It was the time of year for colds, the child’s mother had said that morning. Anna, wearing a white flannel nightgown, amused herself by playing cat’s cradle. She snuggled into the thick cotton quilt her mother had covered her with to keep off the chill.
Suddenly the odd sound of dishes rattling caught Anna’s attention. Her eyes scanned the kitchen counters and cupboards, but she could see nothing. The eerie sound continued. Then, still beneath the quilt, Anna looked for the Tarrants’ old tabby. Had he bumped into some dishes?
Anna called to her mother who had just come into the room with some blue potatoes and thick round carrots from the root cellar. Mrs. Tarrant was harried. She blew a strand of dark brown hair off her face as she rushed into the kitchen.
“Mommy, where’s the cat?” Anna said.
“Here, Anna,” came the reply. “Right behind me.”
Out from Mrs. Tarrant’s skirts came the family pet—straight from the root cellar.
On the day bed Anna filled with fright.
Twelve-year-old Mary Kehoe of Red Head Cove in Conception Bay North was aboard the SS Nerissa with her father, Martin, bound for New York. Once the ship left St. John’s, she was in rough seas. The decks were cleared and below, passengers bit their nails in fear. Others clutched their hands to their hearts and emptied the contents of their bellies. Mary’s father lay next to her in her bunk, holding his daughter tight so she wouldn’t be thrown onto the cabin deck. To make matters worse, Mary’s stomach churned with seasickness.
Back home in Red Head Cove, Mary’s brother and sisters marvelled at the sight of pots and pans dancing around on the stove. It was as if the household items had decided to put on a performance for them. Then the children’s eyes looked up in unison at the ceiling while the house shook.
“It’s a real windy night!” the littlest sister said.
“No, it’s more than that,” her brother answered solemnly.
Meanwhile, as the Nerissa slowly made her way along the Southern Shore past Ferryland light and Chance Cove, Mary and her father, Martin Kehoe, raised quiet prayers to the heavens for their safe passage. Five-year-old Aubrey King stood with his horse in the garden of his home in Point au Gaul, a village on the bottom of the Burin Peninsula. In the last moments of the afternoon, young Aubrey fed the horse hay and tried to push some into its mouth, like a mother feeds a baby. The boy patted the animal’s dark snout. “Atta boy,” he murmured. Then, as he had done so many times before, he stepped back to admire the animal’s large body; his appreciative eyes took in its sleekness, strength, and bulk. The horse was a work animal, part of the machinery that kept the family economy going through the year; it was used to haul wood in the winter and do farmwork in the summer. But little Aubrey loved it like a pet and the animal responded in kind.
Then, late in the afternoon when dusk was nothing more than a hint, Aubrey’s horse suddenly bit him. The boy drew back, ashen-faced and breathless. Then the ground beneath the two of them quivered and shook. The horse grew skittish and Aubrey, still reeling from the shock of the bite, was too afraid to comfort him.
He ran into the house, even as the earth continued to shake under his feet. There he was greeted by the sight of his mother frozen in front of a picture of her father that had fallen from the wall for no reason at all.
In Great Burin, well to the north of Point au Gaul, eleven-yearold Sam Adams was outside in his family’s garden when, late in the afternoon, he felt a tremor under his feet. It was a strange sensation but it didn’t last any time at all and it was mild.
“Did you feel that?” Sam called out to a neighbour.
“Yes, like the earth moved a little,” his friend answered.
Sam nodded. “What do you suppose it was?” he asked. The other boy shook his head and shrugged. Sam dismissed the tremor as one of the mysteries of life, like stars falling to the earth or whales beaching themselves. He left the garden and went inside, where his mother told him that some dishes stored in the cupboard had shook so much she feared they might break. Sam told his mother about the tremor but the two of them did not know what to make of it.
Bessie Hennebury of Lord’s Cove, not far from Point au Gaul, was almost fifteen in November, 1929. She was in her father’s fishing room, helping to weigh his dried fish so it could be collected and shipped away to market. She was standing by the big weights that Mike Harnett, the merchant’s agent, had brought with him to weigh the fish. As she passed the fish to Harnett, everything started shaking: the fish, the tables, the walls, the weights. Indeed, it seemed as if the very ground under them was moving. The clanging sound of the metal weights seemed like it would not stop. It scared Bessie so much that she bolted out of the fishing room, running straight home. She raced up the hill, away from the beach and the water, her heart pummelling her chest walls so that she thought it would break them open. She did not look behind her to see what was happening. As she ran, she didn’t notice if the earth beneath her was shaking here, too; she was desperate to think the tremor was restricted to the fishing rooms.
In Burin Bay Arm, George and Ernest Pike, brothers of ten and eight, were in a hillside meadow above their home. The afternoon was so windless that the meadow grass was motionless. Running through the late fall air was a thread of coolness that hinted at the winter that was just around the corner. Above the boys, though, the skies were an azure blue and cloudless. The Atlantic far below was quiet as if asleep.
The weather was of no concern to the Pike brothers, though. The boys had one thing in mind: their neighbour Mrs. Moulton’s sheep. Mrs. Moulton kept sheep to make wool to sell for a bit of cash, and to have some mutton once in awhile. Some of the old lady’s sheep had somehow escaped from the meadow and Mrs. Moulton was distraught. She was offering twenty-five cents to anyone who could return the strays. The Pike boys were delighted at the opportunity to make a little cash. They had spent their dinner break and the walk home from school planning how they would retrieve the lost sheep. Now, George and Ernest bent over a hole in the fence that surrounded the meadow, intent on their task as they attached a rope snare in the hopes of catching a sheep. In their minds’ eyes were the hard candies they would buy and savour if their venture was successful.
It wasn’t long before they were rewarded. But as soon as a sheep was caught in the snare, the boys were startled by the arrival of a motor car, one of the few in the area. The car turned around just below the meadow. George and Ernest fell to the hard ground on their bellies, trying to hide from the car’s occupants; they thought the people in the car might think they were doing something wrong by catching the sheep.
Then without warning, the ground shook with great force.
“What’s that?” George asked.
“The car must have her winter chains on,” Ernest answered.
“You’re crazy,” his brother replied. “Chains on a car wouldn’t shake the ground like that.”
Ernest frowned. He didn’t know what was going on. When the car left the area, the shaking and the bold noise that accompanied stopped. George and Ernest rose and smoothed out their jackets and pants.
“I don’t know what that was,” George said, staring out at the ocean as if it held the answer. Ernest looked at him, expecting him to say more, but he didn’t.
Then the two boys turned their attention back to the task at hand. They took the sheep out of the rope snare and led it out of the meadow and down to Mrs. Moulton’s. The old lady was standing outside her house, wearing a white cotton apron and a winter coat that she had evidently thrown over her shoulders. She was surrounded by her family, some of whom were pacing back and forth on the road.
“Look at that commotion!” George said.
“I’m not going back in for the money!” one of Mrs. Moulton’s sons cried. From their talk, the Pike boys realized the Moultons were convinced the house was haunted. They thought there was a ghost under the house, a ghost who had caused the stove covers to jump, the dishes to rattle and break, and the pictures to fall off the wall. As they fretted over the ghost shifting the house as it had, Ernest realized they thought the tremor was specific to their house. He knew then it had been more general, taking in at least part of the village all the way to the meadow and possibly beyond. He thought of telling the Moultons this but they were too panicked to listen to him, he figured. And in spite of everything that was happening, the succulent candy remained uppermost in Ernest’s mind. It was getting late, his mother would expect the boys to return home soon, so he decided to take care of business.
He stepped forward to announce their success in catching Mrs. Moulton’s sheep. When her son reached for it, he shook his head.
“No money, no sheep,” he said.
The Moultons stopped talking and the men looked at each other. Mrs. Moulton poked one of them. “I want my sheep back,” she said.
Her son sighed and went into the house, walking slowly as he did. He came out with twenty-five cents and handed it to Ernest. The boys pocketed their reward and went home.
At Lawn, where Anna Tarrant struggled with her sore throat, a bevy of school boys avoided their homework by playing soccer before supper. They were soccer mad in Lawn and in the villages adjacent to it. They started playing the game not long after they could walk.
One of the smaller boys who played that afternoon, Austin Murphy, was just seven. In the middle of the game he stopped to take a rest. He sat on a flat grey rock on the side of the meadow that served as their soccer pitch and took in the unusual brightness of the late fall day. He could see the bay from where he was and, beyond that, the wide Atlantic Ocean, which was as smooth as a baby’s bottom for once. It put Austin in mind of mid-summer, though the nip in the air reminded him it was nearly winter.
Suddenly, the rock shook under him for a full three or four seconds. At first he looked down at it between his skinny little legs, noticing the shaking grass that surrounded it. After the first second or two, he turned his eyes to the boys still playing soccer. They had stopped. They were looking around, too, just as he was. It wasn’t just this rock, then; it was the whole place that was shaking. Perhaps all of Lawn was quaking—or maybe even the whole of Newfoundland.
Austin sat there wondering what was going on. His mates gathered to him. They, too, were flummoxed.
“I never saw anything like that before,” said one of the team captains.
“It was something strange all right,” one of the boys agreed.
None of them were scared; it just hadn’t occurred to them to be afraid, especially since nothing came after the initial tremor.
Then one of the older boys came up with an answer that satisfied them all.
“I know just what it was,” he announced, spinning the soccer ball on his forefinger. “It’s the engines starting up in the powerhouse. That’s what made that shaking.”
The boys nodded. The United Towns Electric Company had all but completed the installation of a hydro-electric plant on Northeast River near Lawn. In November, 1929 the company was about to put the plant into operation, as everyone knew. However, the generators would be turned by water-driven turbines which would make a scarcely audible humming sound. The boys on the soccer pitch, of course, could not know this. They had no way to know that what they had witnessed was the beginning of a tsunami.
Sarah Ann Rennie bent over her Singer sewing machine. She wanted to get a start on her sewing before it got too dark. She hated sewing under the lamp and having to squint; she wanted to save her eyes. She had cut up a shirt of Martin’s, her oldest, and was making it into two shirts for Bernard, the baby. She smiled at her own ingenuity. She knew her long dead mother would be pleased. Her fingers moved in unison, pushing the blue cotton under the needle, as her right foot worked the pedal.
On the black pot-bellied stove was a huge steel pot full of potatoes, carrots, and turnips from Sarah’s root cellar. Sarah had them on slow boil. She’d round out the meal with a bit of salt fish and some of the bread she made every day. She might even let the children have some molasses, though, like all the women in Lord’s Cove and the rest of the communities on the coast, she had to spare it along through the winter.
Sarah was a Fitzpatrick before she married Patrick Rennie of nearby Lamaline. She was born in Lord’s Cove in 1892 and baptized seven weeks later when they could get handy to the priest at Allan’s Island, right by Lamaline. Her father still lived next door to her in Lord’s Cove, alongside The Pond on the eastern side of the cove. The children came right away: Martin, Albert, Rita, Patrick, named for his father, Margaret, and Bernard. There would probably be more, Sarah knew, and when she thought of this, she smiled.
She glanced at baby Bernard as she sewed. At eighteen months, his cheeks were round and pink, the picture of health. He was lively and Sarah had tied him into his high chair. Blond curls framed his face and he called out as he banged his rattle on his high chair table. He was already a handful, this child, Sarah thought, laughing at him as she took a scissors to the cloth in her hands.
Nine-year-old Rita and seven-year-old Patrick played with a spinning top in the pantry. Their little sister, Margaret, only four, was in there with them. Sarah could hear the whir of the top and then the thud as it hit the floor. Then she heard the scuff of Rita’s and Patrick’s shoes on the plank floor. They might be playing school now or house, she thought, alongside the barrels of herring, mackerel, and cod that stood against the pantry wall. Above them hung a brace of rabbits and a row of jars, filled with pickled onions and beets. There were jam jars there, too, containing blueberries and strawberries. Sarah even had some rhubarb jam left, though her children loved it and it was November. Patrick and his sisters were particularly close, little mates, their mother called them. Sarah let them idle with their games before supper and their lessons. They’d have a long dark winter ahead of them and all that trekking to school in the cold, poor mites. And Rita was getting old enough to be a real help to her. She’d let them play when they could.
When the tremor came, Sarah was too face-and-eyes into her sewing machine to notice it. Her foot pushed heavily on the pedal as the needle dove into the pieces of cotton, tying them together. The clack-clack of the machine quickened as she worked and the earth trembled. In the pantry, Rita and Patrick stopped their play as the quake began and laughed at the tremor.
Across the harbour in Lord’s Cove, a group of fishermen played cards at Prosper Walsh’s. They were glad for the leisure. They had spent every waking hour from June until September on the water or bringing their fish in to the beaches for the women to cure. At sea they went to the same grounds their fathers and grandfathers fished. They caught squid and slammed it onto the dozens of hooks on the lines they let out into the water. When they hauled the lines in, they tore codfish off the hooks and threw them into the bellies of their dories. Some days the men roasted in the sun; other days the fog drifted up from the St. Pierre Bank and seeped into their bones. Their wrists constantly itched and pained with the salt water blisters they called water pups. Their backs ached from the bending over; their hands and fingers grew red with nicks and cuts. At night they flopped on their beds, dead weights. During the fall and winter they hunted partridge and snared rabbits, cut wood, and repaired their fishing gear, making new nets and trawls. But, unlike the summer, in fall and winter there was time for a Christmas dance, some mummering, and the odd game of cards with friends.
Patrick Rennie, Sarah’s husband, laughed out loud when he won a hand. “Look Martin! Look Albert!” he called to his oldest sons. “Your father’s won!” He might have been awarded the crown jewels for the smile on his face, russet with years of fishing. The boys smiled, delighted to be among the men. Martin, just into his teens, had been on the water all summer with his father and had not returned to school; he was a man now, a fisherman. Albert intended to follow him.
They were starting to run low on rum and someone mentioned that there was none left in the village.
“Never mind,” one of the card players said. “A few of the fellows have gone over to St. Pierre. I daresay that’s what their errand was for. They should be back this evening. And they might have a drink for us!”
The men sat around the Walshs’ kitchen table while the boys stood behind them, peeking at their cards. Half empty cups of tea stood on the table, as did a few glasses of rum. Suddenly the table shook and the cups and glasses did a little jig. Patrick was the first to laugh, triggering a similar reaction in most of his friends. His sons giggled as well.
But then Prosper Walsh spoke up.
“That was no laughing matter,” he said. His dark eyes fixed on each man and boy, one by one. “Hear what I’m saying. That was an earthquake. And there’s going to be a tidal wave next.”
“Go ’way with you, Prosper,” one of the men said as he shuffled the deck of cards.
But Prosper shook his head. He had been on schooner crews and had travelled to places these shore fishermen had never been: the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, North Africa. He had been in earthquakes, seen tidal waves, lived through the eyes of southern hurricanes.
“No, fellows,” he said. “It’s no joke. I’m telling you there’s going to be a tidal wave. Look—there’s going to be a big storm, here onshore.”
“Have another drink, Prosper,” one of the fishermen said, bringing gales of laughter from the others.
“We’ve got to get all the women and children to dry land,” Prosper pleaded. “It won’t be safe right down in the village.”
“Are you going to build an ark, too?” the same fisherman asked.
“God help us if I’m right,” said Prosper. “This whole place will be swamped by a great big sea while you fellows play cards.”
As Prosper spoke, young Martin Rennie found he couldn’t laugh with the rest of the boys and men, even as his father and brother did. In his chest was a monkey’s fist that kept twisting tighter and tighter. By the end of the conversation he was as stiff as a cold junk with fear.
Lord’s Cove lies at the tip of the Burin Peninsula and is shaped like a horseshoe, with high hills rising way up out of the sea ringing the harbour. Lord’s Cove is likely named after the rainbowfeathered Harlequin ducks that frequent its shores and were nicknamed lords and ladies by the island’s early settlers.
One family was living in Lord’s Cove by 1800, at least for the duration of the summer, to fish; they might have repaired to the less exposed woods for the winter, as most early rural Newfoundlanders did. They had no doctor or nurse, just their own common sense and the kitchen medicine their mothers bred into their bones. By the middle of the century, the fifty fishermen of Lord’s Cove had nineteen boats from which they caught more than five hundred quintals of codfish as well as four barrels of salmon, worth more than five hundred pounds. They had cattle, milch cows, and sheep as insurance against hunger. They also had eighty-five acres of land under cultivation. Ten years later their children were taking lessons, in a house, not a school—it would be another half century before they’d have one.
By 1921, eight years before the earth rumbled for a full five minutes on a beautiful November evening, there were 208 people living in Lord’s Cove. In its harbour were forty-six boats and seventeen fishing rooms. They had built a community.
Unlike nearby Point May and Taylor’s Bay, Lord’s Cove wasn’t built on flat land and surrounded by meadows and semi-tundra with the woods way in behind. Here the trees came almost right up to the village, combining with the hills and jumble of twostorey clapboard houses to make for a cozy feeling. The rich cod fishing grounds were just offshore, too, giving the men of Lord’s Cove an advantage that their brethren in more sheltered parts of Placentia Bay and elsewhere in Newfoundland lacked.
An hour or more had passed and Prosper Walsh had abandoned his friends at their card game as his heart ached at their indifference to his warning. Young Martin Rennie followed him out the door, casting a backward glance at his father, Patrick, and brother, Albert, still enjoying the game. Prosper ignored the boy at his heels and banged on his neighbour’s door, calling out, “We’re going to have a tidal wave! Get to higher ground.”
Bruised from his experience with the card players, he didn’t wait to gauge anyone’s reaction this time. Instead, he went from one house to another as if in a barn dance, calling as loudly as he could, “We’re going to have a tidal wave! Get to higher ground.”
Martin saw two women standing in the pathway between their houses, looking after Prosper as he sped along banging on doors.
“I believe him,” said one. “I’m getting my youngsters and going up to the woods.”
“My husband is not back yet from the cards,” her friend responded, shaking her head. “He’s not worried. Why should I be?”
“I’m not waiting for my husband,” came the reply. “I’m the captain of the shore crew anyway.”
Martin was glued to the ground but he willed his feet to move. He didn’t follow Prosper this time. He headed back to the Walsh’s kitchen; he would try and convince his father and brother that Prosper was right and that they must act quickly to get their mother Sarah and the little children to the safety of the woods.
To the south, Nan and Herbert Hillier were walking to Lamaline from their home in Point au Gaul for an Orange Lodge meeting scheduled for seven o’clock that evening. Nan had spent the day baking blueberry pies and sponge cakes for the gathering. She had picked the blueberries that fall with the help of her two eldest, Leslie, ten, and Ruby, eight; the berries had been the fruit of a bumper crop. Ruby had helped her with the sponge cakes, too. Then Nan and her husband packed the baked goods in a suitcase for the three mile journey. It was a beautiful evening; with the sun about to go down in a cloudless sky, the autumn air was bracing, just the way Nan liked it. There was no wind and hence, almost no noise from the sea, something they were not used to.
At about the halfway point between Point au Gaul and Lamaline, the earth began to tremble and Nan and Herbert froze in their boots. Nan looked up to see telegraph wires vibrating and emitting a loud buzz, as if they might explode. She drew toward Herbert, too shocked to speak. She tried to steady her feet on the hard ground but the rumbling of the earth continued a full minute. Then it stopped.
When it was over she cried, “Herbert, what’s happening?”
Her husband, a veteran of the first world war, had been to southern climes and recognized what he had just witnessed. “It’s an earth tremor, Nan,” he said gently.
“Will we go back home?” Nan asked anxiously, thinking of their children. Besides Leslie and Ruby, she had two little boys, Lawson and Charlie. She wondered if they had felt the tremor too, and were frightened. She assumed it went all the way to Point au Gaul, seeing as it travelled on the telegraph wires like that.
Herbert stomped his feet as if to demonstrate the steadiness of the earth. He smiled broadly. “Solid again!” he said. “No, it’s nothing. We’ll go on.”
Nan, in her shyness, always deferred to Herbert. She looked around, trying to convince herself that everything had returned to normal. She relaxed and breathed in the comfort of the clean air.
They crossed the three-hundred-foot-long Salmonier Bridge, bringing them into the next community. In Lamaline everyone was talking about the rumbling; it seemed that no one had experienced such a thing before. Some of the women told Nan their houses had shaken as if they would never stop. They had run outside in fright and been too afraid to go back into their homes. When it was over, they finally went inside to find dishes and glassware scattered and broken all over their kitchen floors. Although the earth seemed to have returned to its usual quietude, they were still frightened. When Herbert registered the women’s fear, he came over and explained the nature of earth tremors to them. Then he added, “It’s over and finished.”
But, try as she might, Nan could not stop thinking of her children back in Point au Gaul.
Point au Gaul lies at the bottom of the Burin Peninsula, flat and exposed to the North Atlantic Ocean, not far from St. Pierre Bank and north of the famous Grand Banks that had been a food basket for numerous nations for centuries. At Point au Gaul a narrow beach runs for half a mile, separating the cold waves from the level grasslands that reach far inland to the low-lying coniferous woods. The name Point au Gaul may be a translation of Frenchman’s Point, a reference to the first European settler, a man from France called Hillier. The area was of vital importance to French fishermen for many years; they recognized its easy access to abundant cod stocks and the usefulness of its flat land and beaches for drying fish.
The settlers of Point au Gaul had strong connections to the nearby French island of St. Pierre, where they traded their surplus vegetables and sometimes met the man or woman they would marry. Over the years, French families moved into the village—the Martins, Millons, and Roberes among them. With one eye on the lucrative fishery in the area, a merchant set up shop around the turn of the century.
In 1921, the village’s fifty-eight fishermen along with thirtyeight women working on the beach had produced fish products worth $13,328—a considerable sum. By November, 1929, Point au Gaul was a vigorous community of well over two hundred people, a good size outport for this part of the Burin Peninsula. Most of the forty-five houses straddled the grasses that bordered the narrow beach in Point au Gaul. They were, then, very close to the waves of the North Atlantic. For them, this represented riches, not danger.
Back home in Point au Gaul that crisp November evening, the tremor was all the talk as well. No one understood what was going on. Twelve-year-old Caroline Hillier, a very distant relative of Nan’s, felt the hairs on her head stiffen as the rumbling seemed to go on and on. She had been in her family’s house, helping in the kitchen. Like many in the village, Caroline had run outside with her mother and her toddler brother, Ben, to see what was happening and to get away from the weird sound of dishes rattling. But there was no way to escape the thunder that accompanied the shaking. Caroline bit her lip as she listened to the older people talk of the mystery and her breathing grew rapid and shallow. She clutched her mother’s hand and touched little Ben’s stockinged foot, dangling as his mother held him. The human contact reassured her and she calmed slightly, but the terrible shaking of the ground below them continued. And then, just as suddenly as it had come, it halted.
“Thank God!” someone called out.
“It’s not the end of the world, then,” said another neighbour in relief.
“Not yet anyway,” another weighed in, trying to sound lighthearted.
They looked at the sky, as if they hoped the face of God might appear to tell them not to worry. But there was nothing in the sky, not a single fluffy cloud, not a single black-backed gull or sooty shearwater. The air was crisp and clear and a windless graveyard stillness descended upon the village and the rest of the coast. Though their hearts still fluttered in their chests, it was impossible to believe that anything untoward could happen now. And clearly “the Big Thump,” as the people of Point au Gaul had already begun to call it, was over.
Still jumpy, Caroline scanned the village with her eyes. It was then that she saw Joe Miller, an old man from France who had moved to Point au Gaul. He seems to be up to something, Caroline thought from her station on an incline known as “Up the Hill.” Joe Miller was on the level ground that adjoined the beach and the fishing rooms known as “Down the Town.” He was on his knees. Caroline let go of her mother’s hand and Ben’s little foot and rushed Down the Town. She shimmied her way into the small crowd that had by now gathered around old Joe. She saw that his ear was pressed to the ground and his eyes were closed. The group watched him in silence as dusk drew in on this strangest of nights. He remained in his position for several minutes.
Finally, Joe hauled himself up and stood. He folded his arms in front of his chest and announced, “Prepare yourselves for a tidal wave.”
“What?”
“Prepare yourselves for a tidal wave,” he repeated in his thick French accent.
“A tidal wave indeed,” one man said. “Joe, it’s a perfectly calm evening.”
Joe pursed his lips but said nothing. Caroline stared at him. The little crowd murmured among themselves. How could there be any kind of storm on an evening like this? She saw Joe shrug as the crowd began to disperse.
Caroline was inclined to agree with them. She was getting fed up with all this rumbling and dire talk. She wanted to get back to her own house. Her father’s birthday, the twenty-first of November, was in a few days and they were having a party! Caroline could never remember her father celebrating his birthday before, which only added to the excitement.
“Yes, child, this is the first one he’s ever marked,” her mother had said to her as they added raisins to the fruitcake they were making. They’d have a sponge cake but he loved fruitcake so they were making that as well. He could take it with him when he went on his next work trip. The idea for the celebration came from Thomas, Caroline’s father. One quiet black night in late August, he told his wife, “I feel the need to visit with my close friends, with my buddies. I want to have a little celebration with them.”
His wife, Lydia, nodded, though she frowned a little at her husband’s circumspect tone. She had never heard him talk in this manner before; he sounded like an old man.
“My birthday is a good time to do it,” he said.
“It is,” Lydia smiled. “It’s a grand time.”
Thomas Hillier was a fish oil inspector for the government of Newfoundland. Fish oil was an important export and Hillier’s work required him to travel all over the country, ensuring that outgoing products were of high quality. Caroline often missed him when he was gone; so did Lydia, a native of Grand Bank who had moved to Point au Gaul upon her marriage and was now expecting another child in a couple of months.
Besides her little brother, Ben, Caroline had two older halfsiblings, Harold, nineteen, and Georgina, twenty, children from her father’s first marriage, making for a full household. Like Nan Hillier who fretted for her children back home, Harold and Georgina had gone to the Orange Lodge supper meeting in Lamaline. The Hillier siblings walked to Lamaline with their friends, David and Jessie Hipditch, the parents of three small children who they’d left in the care of Jessie’s parents back in Point au Gaul. When Jessie Hipditch felt the tremor, she saw her eight month old daughter Elizabeth in front of her face, waving at her. Then the child disappeared. It was the oddest sensation, but it was hard to pay it any mind with the blue skies and the windless air.
Five-year-old Pearl Brushett yawned as she sat on the edge of her bed. She slowly pulled her socks off, forgetfully throwing them on the floor. When the left one gently flopped on the softwood, she threw herself back on her bed and sighed gratefully. She wasn’t used to school, this was her first year, and it was tiring her out. It was a long walk to the schoolhouse, she had to struggle to keep up with her big brother, Fred, who was ten. And it seemed so long until dinner every day. In the classroom she often found herself staring out the window thinking of her doll, Annie, and wishing she was home, tucking Annie in and telling her a story.
“Miss Brushett!” the teacher called those times. Pearl could never relax. That was what was wearing her out.
She remembered her sock on the floor. She rose from the bed, then leaned down and picked it up, taking the other in her hand as well. She carried them to the brin bag her mother kept in a closet in the hallway. It was full of dirty clothes, it always was; there were seven of them in the Brushett family and it seemed Carrie, Pearl’s mother, could never get to the bottom of the brin bag no matter how hard she tried.
Pearl smoothed her flannelette nightie and pulled back her bed clothes. She puffed up her pillow, turned around, and sank onto her bed. Her seven-year-old sister, Lillian, already lay in bed, white-faced with an earache. Their mother, Carrie, had warmed up a plate and wrapped it in a blanket; Lillian lay with it under her head now trying to derive some comfort from it. Poor Lillian, Pearl thought, as she shimmied into bed. Pearl’s other sister, Lottie, who was eight, would be in soon, too. Between the two of them, the bed would be all warmed up for her.
“Mommy!” she called. She could not go to sleep without her mother’s good night kiss.
“I’ll be there in a minute,” Carrie answered. “I’m just tucking in your little brother.”
Pearl was already floating toward sleep when she felt her mother’s soft lips on her forehead.
“You’re my good girl, aren’t you?” Carrie said softly.
Pearl nodded sleepily, smiling. How she loved the sound of her mother’s voice.
“Here, make sure Annie is tucked in there with you,” Carrie said, pulling the covers tight around her daughter. “Good night now. Sweet dreams always.”
“Always,” Pearl whispered.
Pearl’s home was in Kelly’s Cove on Great Burin Island, the site of two other villages, Shalloway, and Great Burin. With other settlements on the peninsula nearby, including Whale Cove, Kirby’s Cove, Burin Bay, Collin’s Cove, Ship Cove, and Path End, Kelly’s Cove was part of Burin. A rocky area of sheltered coves, Burin may be named for an engraving tool, burine in French; according to legend, a French sailor was on deck holding a burine when he noticed how it resembled the harbour.
The European presence here came early. Basque fishermen frequented Buria Audia (Great Burin) and Buria Chumea (Little Burin) as early as 1650. In 1662, the parliament of Brittany, France, allotted forty fishermen to Great Burin. The English did not come until 1718, when Christopher Spurrier of Poole, England, established his shipbuilding enterprise at Ship Cove (thus giving it its name presumably). By 1740, 130 English men, women, and children over-wintered, becoming the first permanent European settlers. They were later joined by substantial numbers of Jersey fishermen. Burin received imports of salt meat, rum, molasses, and salt, and became the capital of the bay.
Like most of the men on Great Burin Island, Pearl’s father, William, was a fisherman. William was in the shore fishery and had a good season in 1929. He’d had several good years, in fact, as had most of his neighbours. The people of Burin knew about the Bank Crash in New York and the Depression that was beginning to sink economies all over the western world but they were not too worried about themselves. They had put a bit away during their good years. They had learned to be prudent over the years, to take absolutely nothing for granted. William Brushett was out of debt now and he intended to stay that way. When he talked about the Bank Crash with his neighbours they spoke of their pity for urban dwellers.
“At least we got our pantries full of food,” William would say. “Salt cod, herring, a bit of salmon and smoked caplin. Root crops. Things we can hunt. We’ll never starve to death, but I don’t know what will happen to those people in the cities with this Bank Crash and the money worth nothing.”
William had thought of these things as he walked into the woods on the fine, clear morning of November 18, 1929, his axe in his hand. He drank in the cool autumn air and enjoyed the sounds of chickadees and juncos. He took long strides, his belly contented with the scrambled eggs and bacon Carrie had prepared for his breakfast. The tea she made, too, it was always wonderful; somehow, she always made the best tea.
William was on his way to get the family’s winter supply of wood. He’d gone in the bay, away from rocky Burin, and later when the snow came, he would bring his horse back to fetch his cords of wood. It was a beautiful day for a journey of any kind and he imagined that Carrie would have made good use of the kind weather to wash and dry clothes. You almost couldn’t believe winter was at hand.
Someone was shaking Pearl. Was it that strange rumbling again? She hoped not; she hadn’t liked that at all. She just wanted to sleep. But her mother wouldn’t let her.
“Wake them up, Mommy!” she thought she heard Lottie say.
“Pearl, get up,” Carrie said. Pearl heard the firmness in her voice.
“Mommy, I’m tired,” Pearl mumbled. “I’m too tired to go to school.”
“Pearl, get up now,” Carried insisted. Pearl sat up in bed at once. “Get up and put this on.”
Her mother tossed her winter coat at her. Pearl rubbed her eyes. She was surprised to see her older brother, Fred, standing in her room, all dressed in his winter clothes. Her mother held little James, also wearing his winter coat. The bed was empty beside her, and Lottie was standing next to their brothers shivering. The room was dark; it must be night still, Pearl thought. What was going on?
The little girl jumped out of bed and wrapped her winter coat around her. She stared at her mother who was peeping out through the curtains which she had drawn tightly together. Pearl leaned over to look, but Carrie tightened the curtains in her hand.
“Keep away from the window!” she ordered.
But Pearl had already seen crushed stages and flakes and the debris-filled harbour. But she knew it wasn’t Kelly’s Cove.
“Mommy, what’s happening?” she asked. She looked at her mother whose face was tight in a frown. Carrie said nothing. Pearl looked at her brother Fred. As he opened his mouth, he caught his mother’s eye and clamped shut. Pearl raised huge eyes to her mother’s face. Then she noticed that the floor underneath her seemed unsteady.
“Hold onto the bedpost, children!” Carrie said. The baby in her arms began to wail. Carrie’s knuckles went white as she continued to peer out through the sliver of an opening in the curtains.
Then the house seemed as if it were flying. The older children clung to the bedpost even as the bed slid across the floor. Carrie clutched James and stood with her back flat against the wall at a right angle to the window. Somehow she stayed upright.
“Mommy!” the children cried in unison.
Then the house stopped flying and everything seemed to stop.
“It’s still,” Pearl cried. “Mommy, where are we?”
Carrie drew back the curtain slightly and let out a great gasp.
“Oh God, my God, thank God” she said. “We’re back home.”
She laid the baby and her toddler on Pearl’s bed and picked up her daughter’s chair. She hurled it through the window.
“Help!” she cried. “Help us!”
Pearl’s mouth hung open as blood ran down her mother’s wrist but Carrie ignored it. Then she rushed to the window and watched her chair fly to the ground. My father built that chair, she thought, pout-faced.
“Help us!” her mother cried again.
“We can go downstairs,” said Pearl’s brother Fred. “We can get out that way.”
“Good boy,” said Carrie. “See if you can do that.”
The boy left Pearl’s bedroom and hurried down the narrow hallway to the stairs. But he stopped at the top; the stairway was covered in frigid seawater. Below him chairs, table legs, and his mother’s knitting floated eerily. He screamed.
“Mommy! We can’t go down there!” he howled. “The stairs are full of water.”
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” Carrie said, though her breathing came rapidly. “Ben and Beatrice Hollett are down there. See? They see us. They’re going to get us.” She took her son’s hand and led him toward the broken window.
Pearl was shivering now. But she couldn’t stop thinking about her broken chair. She still didn’t know what had happened. How could the stairs be full of water? Was she dreaming? Perhaps she was being visited by the old hag? None of this made any sense…
With little James perched on her hip, Carrie ran back to the top of the stairs. She exhaled in relief when she saw that the water was low enough that they could walk downstairs.
“Come on, children!” she cried. “Everyone follow me.”
Fred, Lottie, Lillian who had retrieved her still warm plate for her ear, and Pearl trailed after their mother down the stairs through icy water. They let out shrieks as the coldness pierced their bones. They looked from the sea water to the parlour window as they heard the shattering of glass.
Then Pearl felt her mother’s arms around her and she was being passed to someone on a ladder. He carried her to the beach. It was freezing. Her little brother James was crying. Her mother was still in the house with her big brother. “We went all the way to Bartlett’s Island!” Carrie cried. Really? Pearl wondered. Then they were all on the beach. She blanched at the crimson that was spreading across her mother’s arm.
“She needs a bandage,” Beatrice Hollett said.
“Get to higher ground!” someone called. Maybe it was Mr. Hollett. They ran as fast as they could to Humpess Head, Pearl holding Carrie’s hand. Something was chasing them. As they ran, Pearl glanced behind to see that it was a wall of ice water and it took their house again and carried it away where they could no longer see it. On the hill where they finally found safety, Carrie Brushett pulled her five children to her and sobbed from the deepest part of her belly.
When William Brushett rowed into Kelly’s Cove on Great Burin Island two days later, his heart was thumping. He had felt the rumbling, heard the thunder, and watched the walls of water steal houses and take lives. The night before he reached Kelly’s Cove he paced a friend’s floor in the village of Stepaside, worrying for Carrie and his children. Now, as snow fell on his shoulders while he rowed, the cove was chock-a-block with debris, mostly wood from dories, schooners, and buildings. William was afraid he would see a body.
When he hauled his boat up, he met Ben Hollett, who called, “yes, they’re safe,” before William could even ask. William’s tears flowed in rivers and he let out a great sob that filled the harbour. He glanced up at the village and saw Pearl come round the corner of a neighbour’s house. “My chair is gone, Daddy!” she cried. “The one you made for me.” He ran toward her and pulled her off the ground into his big fisherman’s arm. He held her tight as he faced the harbour and surveyed the damage the tsunami had caused.
William could see right away that his house was gone. So were his flake and his stage. The Brushetts lost the three barrels of potatoes and two barrels of turnips that would have seen them through the winter. Their five hens were drowned. They’d also lost the four gallons of molasses they’d bought. Gone also was their two tons of coal and two cords of firewood, their means of staying warm from now until spring would break months later. The long wild ride to Bartlett’s Island had cost William and Carrie Brushett possessions worth $1,493—everything they owned. All they had left was the forty dollars in William’s pocket. But Fred, Lottie, Lillian, Pearl, and James were alive and they only had cuts and bruises.
The village of Lawn rises out of a lush valley on the southern end of the Burin Peninsula. According to the local families, the first Europeans to over-winter there were Irish and they enjoyed one of the best fishing harbours on the South Coast. The people fished cod, caplin, salmon, herring, and lobster, which they processed in a factory that employed eight people in 1891. They also ran a seal fishery.
As six-year-old Anna Tarrant lay frozen with fear on the kitchen day bed in her Lawn home, her mother came rushing in from the root cellar, the family tabby behind her. Hilda Murphy Tarrant, a native of St. John’s who had married a local man, dropped her carrots and blue potatoes with a great thud. Beneath her the ground shook.
“Mommy!” Anna cried, in spite of her sore throat. Anna’s little sister, Elizabeth, and brother, Charles, only two, toddled in. Baby Joe was upstairs in the crib his father had made long ago for the Tarrants’ first child. Elizabeth and Charles were too young to be scared of the rumbling itself but they caught sight of the whitening of their mother’s face.
“Where’s Isadore?” Hilda asked of her oldest child.
Anna shrugged. “I don’t know,” she whispered. She had been sick all day, drifting in and out of sleep, and hadn’t paid too much attention to the comings and goings of her sister and brothers.
Hilda put her hand to her mouth.
“Where’s your father?” she cried, looking around the kitchen, seemingly oblivious to the shaking stacks of dishes.
As soon as the rumbling stopped, Pat Tarrant appeared. At forty-three, he was ten years older than his wife. He had been in the Royal Navy as a young man and had witnessed an earthquake in the crystal waters of the Indian Ocean.
“Hilda, get the children in warm clothes and get them to high ground,” he ordered. “There’s a tidal wave on the way.”
“I’m sick, Daddy,” Anna said feebly.
“I know, child,” her father answered, bending down so that he was face to face with her. “But you have to be brave now. You have to get dressed and put on your winter coat. Then you have to go up the hill with Mommy because there’s going to be a big wave come in.”
“Pat, what do you mean?” Hilda said. “Will it come all the way in to the houses?”
“It might, maid,” her husband answered. “We have to be prepared. I’ve seen it happen when I was overseas.”
Hilda shuddered. Anna hiccupped in fear.
“We have to find Isadore,” Hilda said, shoving a fingernail between her teeth.
“Don’t worry,” Pat said. “I’ll get him. I’m going to alert the neighbours anyway. You bundle up the children and take them to the top of the hill as quickly as you can.”
In a flash he was gone. Then, as Anna was getting out of her pajamas and into a dress Hilda had fetched from upstairs, her father rushed back into the house. Holding his hand was ten-yearold Isadore, ashen-faced.
“Mommy!” he said, running to Hilda and wrapping his arms around her.
“He was just next door at Victoria and Nick’s,” Pat said. “He was too afraid to move with the tremors.” He turned to his eldest. “You’re safe now. Just do what your mother says and help her with the other children.” Then he was gone again.
Pat Tarrant went from one house to another on the low land that ringed the harbour, banging on doors and shouting, “There’s a tidal wave coming! Get to high ground!” Men and women came out of their houses and watched him knock on their neighbours’ doors
“Do you think so, Pat?” they called.
“I do!” he replied, still walking. “I do, I saw it in the Indian Ocean.”
He was a respected man and they believed him. They raced back into their houses and pulled babies out of cribs, toddlers out of beds, and wrapped their children in their winter coats. They slammed their doors shut and fixed their eyes on the high land as they made for it as quickly as they could, ignoring the stillness of the water below. There was no wind in the air but Pat Tarrant’s words held sway.
With everyone except Kate and Tom Tarrant, an old couple who refused to leave their home which abutted the beach. Distant relatives of Pat’s, they did not believe their house was in any danger.
“It’s a clear night,” sixty-seven-year-old Tom told Anna’s father. “I think everything’s all right.”
“That rumbling is all over now,” his sixty-three-year-old wife echoed him. “Everything’s fine now.”
Pat shook his head; he was certain the old couple was in danger. But there were others to warn, more doors to bang on. He moved on. He looked up from the beach and saw dozens of people streaming out of their houses to the higher ground. Some of them went into dwellings built on the hills around Lawn; others went beyond the houses to even higher land.
As Hilda Tarrant led her children out the door, with her youngest in her arms, she looked behind at a sponge cake on the kitchen counter. She had baked it for Pat’s birthday, which was today.
At seven-thirty the water drained out of Lawn harbour, revealing a mass of seaweed over endless grey and blue beach rocks. By now Pat had rejoined his wife and children who were climbing up the hill to the Tarrants’ barn.
“Don’t look back,” Pat told them.
But Anna did and she saw her neighbours’ homes go out to sea when a hundred foot wave came in and took them. Then the water withdrew again, leaving two-masted schooners high and dry in the harbour. Around them were splinters of wood from dories, flakes and stages. Pat realized that old Tom and Kate Tarrant had remained in their home. Even in the dimness of the evening light he could see that their house remained intact. Pat pulled away from Hilda and the children and confided his worry to the men he fished with. With a squeeze of Hilda’s shoulder, he hurried down the hill with his dory mates.
“Will you be all right?” she asked.
“I will!” he called. “I think that’s the last of it! I’ll be back— stay there with the little ones!”
Anna shivered as the darkness drew in. Her throat ached; how she wished for some molasses.
Down below, Pat and the other fishermen waded through icy sea water and debris to reach Tom and Kate Tarrant. Oddly, the fence surrounding the old couple’s garden remained standing and the men had to climb over it in their soaking wet clothes. When they opened the Tarrants’ door, Kate said, “Thank God!” Then the cries she had been holding in came out full force. Pat picked her up and laid her over his shoulders. The other men carried Tom. The hardest part was getting them over the fence, which they tried to kick down but could not since the water was so heavy. Once they were clear of the sea water, the Tarrants walked up the hill to join the neighbours in the barn. But before he returned, Pat dashed into his own house and retrieved his birthday cake.
There was no loss of life in Lawn, due largely to the efforts of Pat Tarrant. But the property damage was considerable, especially for those families who lived near the beach. Pat Tarrant’s own fishing enterprise suffered considerably. His stage was swept away, and his wharf and flake were badly damaged. He lost his trap moorings, five trap kegs, a leader for his trap, a buoy rope, a herring net, and thirty hogsheads of salt. In addition, two tons of coal meant to keep his brood warm over the winter were swept away. As he stood on the shore in the morning, on the spot where his stage had been, he was dumbstuck at his losses. He had been fishing since he was a boy and now, thirty years later, with a wife and five children, it was as if he was starting all over.
The house of Pat’s neighbours, Celestine and Jane Edwards, was so badly damaged it would have to be entirely rebuilt. The parents of five young children, the Edwards’ food stores were completely gone as well. Jane lamented the loss of the organ she loved to play every evening; getting another one would have to wait—her prized possession had cost $135—and would be hard to come by in any case.
Frederick and Margaret Edwards’ house was also beyond repair. The first wave had ripped it from its foundation. Assessing the damage in the dark after the sea had returned to its normal state that night, Fred saw that all the house’s concrete pillars were broken. So was the chimney, which lay flat on the soaking ground, ripped right off the rest of the dwelling.
“I expect we’ll need twenty or more barrels of cement to rebuild,” Fred told Pat Tarrant in the blackness of the night. “Maybe more.”
“Yes,” Pat nodded. “And a thousand feet of lumber.”
Fred shook his head.
“Don’t worry,” Pat said. “We’ll pull together. You’ll come through it somehow.”
Fred’s heart was like lead. His wharf was also beaten up, as was his store. The giant wave had stolen a hogshead of salt, a barrel of flour, and a ton of coal—in the cold month of November. It had also destroyed his stable.
“I don’t know,” he told Pat.
Young Augustine Murphy was also in need of comfort. At eighteen, he was the sole breadwinner for his thirty-nine-year-old widowed mother, Angela, his fifteen-year-old brother John, and his three little step-siblings. He cracked his knuckles as he paced back and forth on the spot where his flake had been. He hadn’t had a particularly successful fishing season and he really couldn’t afford a loss of any kind. In fact, his family had virtually no provisions. His stage was rendered useless by the first wave; his moorings destroyed. He’d have to get all that sorted out over the winter for the next fishing season.
The second wave had hauled away their half ton of coal and ten planks Augustine had collected to build a little bridge to his stage and flake, which were now gone anyway. He wiped his forehead when he thought of it. After he surveyed the damage the waves had wrought, he headed home to tell Angela and the children what they faced the winter. He lugged in their barrel of flour but about half of it had been ruined by sea water. Stoney-faced at the news of their losses, Angela turned to the flour and picked through it, trying to salvage what she could.
In Lamaline, Herbert Hillier had almost convinced his wife, Nan, that the tremor they had felt on the way from their home in Point au Gaul was nothing to be concerned about. Nan tried to enjoy the Orange Lodge supper in Lamaline with her neighbours from home and their friends in other communities on the bottom of the Burin Peninsula. But, in spite of Herbert’s attempts to reassure her, memories of the earth’s rumbling nagged at Nan. It didn’t help matters that the diners at the Orange Hall talked of nothing else.
At the supper Nan sat next to her sister and brother-in-law from Point au Gaul, Jessie and David Hipditch. Jessie told Nan of the strange vision of her baby, Elizabeth, she had experienced just after the tremor. But with her husband’s encouragement she had brushed it off. The Hipditch children, including five-year-old George and three-year-old Henry, were safe with their grandmother, Lizzie Hillier, who was Jessie’s mother.
As people arrived at the hall, they brought the fanciful news that the harbour waters had receded way below the normal low tide mark. In fact, the mark kept falling farther back, as if some giant force was sucking the water out of the harbour, so much so that the bottom of the harbour was now exposed for the first time ever. Jessie, David, and Nan rushed outside to see this remarkable phenomenon. The hall was on the highest point of land in Lamaline and they peered down on the dry harbour bottom, amazed to see the smooth stones, dark sand, and reams of seaweed that lay there.
“I never thought I’d see that,” David said. A small group that had gathered behind him murmured in agreement. But worry lines crossed their faces as well. Their fears were realized when the water that had disappeared so quietly came barrelling in with the force of a canon ball.
“It’s coming in!” Nan heard someone shriek. “It’s coming in!”
She clung to Herbert as dusk drew in and they strained to watch the water rise to twenty feet from almost nothing a few moments before. Then a wall of seawater, icy and swift, raced to the houses that clung to the shore. Nan gasped as she saw men and women run away with screaming children in their arms. The ocean flooded the homes they had vacated just in time and swamped the school which had also been built on lower ground. The roads were buried in water as well.
Nan swallowed her breath as she watched the water rise up the hill toward the Orange Hall where she stood as stiff as a marsh bittern. What would they do if the water came up there? But then it stopped, still two hundred yards away, and began to recede. It carried out chicken houses, dories, and fences. The fence posts reminded Nan of matchsticks as they were swept away. The squawking of the poor drowning birds stuck in her ears. She turned to her husband.
“Oh Herbert, what will we do? What about the children?”
His answer was gruff. “Never mind, never mind now,” he said. “They’ll be all right. Don’t be frightened.”
But Nan’s heart crept up in her chest into her throat and mouth. All around her, women cried and the faces of men grew white as snow. They were deathly afraid for their children in Point au Gaul, High Beach, Taylor’s Bay, and Lord’s Cove. It would be at least an hour before any of them could get home. They walked in and out of the hall, letting their gravy solidify and their potatoes harden, as they waited for the next onslaught from the Atlantic.
It came, as they knew it would from the behaviour of the sea, but it was not as fierce as the first wave and the houses on the lower ground in Lamaline were empty now. When it receded this time, the people in the Orange Lodge were more confident it would not return and they were right.
Jessie Hipditch had watched the whole thing and could not contain the thumping in her chest. By now, she was convinced the sight of baby Elizabeth on the walk to Lamaline from Point au Gaul was a dark omen, maybe even a token. She pulled on her raven hair as she rushed up to Nan.
“Are you going home?” she asked. “We’re going now.”
Nan nodded and Herbert agreed. “Don’t worry,” Herbert told Jessie. “There was enough warning that everyone got out of their houses on time. There’s only been property damage.”
Jessie’s husband, David, joined the trio by now and he gave a quick nod in agreement but Nan could see the worry flush on his face.
“Let’s get going,” she said.
Out of habit, Herbert picked up their suitcase, which contained only one cake by now. The four of them discussed the safest route home and decided they would stick to high land. They said quick good-byes and left the hall. They crossed the bog on high ground, rather than risk walking through Lamaline itself, on the off-chance that the seawater wasn’t done rushing in.
Traversing the bog was hard work and cold in November. All four were soaked to their knees by the time they made it to the road that would take them to Point au Gaul by an inland route. Nan tried to chat, but while Herbert made small talk, she noticed that Jessie and David were silent the whole time. They reached the road first and then walked as fast as they could in bogwatersoaked clothing to their village.
On the way, they passed a Lamaline man with his granddaughter in his arms and his daughter walking wordlessly alongside him. Nan’s mind was cloudy and she did not speak to him; five minutes later, she couldn’t say if he was an apparition or not.
When Nan and Herbert reached Salmonier Bridge, they stopped. Its great wooden piers had been washed away by the tsunami. Farther, what remained of the bridge was tipped at such an angle that they could cross it only by clinging to the rail, which was now on the top of the bridge. The moon bathed the land in a brilliant glow by now and Nan could see Jessie and David on the wrecked structure, quickly pushing on.
“Well, we’ll have to cross it, too,” Herbert said. Nan nodded. By the time they crossed the creaky bridge, Jessie and David were out of sight. As the harbour came within view, they could see it was chock-a-block with wreckage. It was as if a half dozen ships had gone aground.
“Well, my boat is gone,” Herbert said. He sounded nonchalant; indeed, he had expected this after the events he had witnessed in Lamaline, but Nan felt a catch in her throat.
Than a man appeared out of the darkness and shouted, “Stop!”
Nan hesitated; she wanted to ask him what he wanted, but Herbert said, “Never mind, come on!” He had just felt the weight of a boulder in his belly and he suddenly knew that something much worse than property damage had happened in Point au Gaul.
Then he and Nan passed a woman who was moving slowly and crying.
“Did you notice that woman, Herbert?” Nan said. “I wonder why she’s crying?”
But Herbert, weighed down by the weight in his stomach, didn’t answer. He rushed into the village with his wife. In the moonlight their eyes took in the destruction along the waterfront: the wrecked stages, stores, gears, traps, and boats. Herbert could form no words. Not even the sight of the wave action in Lamaline had prepared him for this. He grabbed Nan’s elbow and turned up toward their home.
Nan’s brother, Chesley, met them at the gate. Nan saw that he was alone.
“Where are the children?” she screamed.
“They’re safe. They’re with mother on the hill,” he answered quickly. “I brought them up and came back here to meet you.”
Nan’s body went soft. She hardly heard Chesley explain how he barely had time to get the children to their grandmother’s house on high land. Her heart ached for them. She had to see them. She turned to Herbert. “Let’s go to the children,” she said.
“You can’t go, Nan,” Chesley said. “The bridge across the brook is gone.”
Herbert saw the wetness in his wife’s eyes. “You stay here with Chesley and I’ll go get the children,” he said.
Nan let out a heavy sigh. She went inside to put the kettle on. Even though Chesley told her there had been no damage to the house, she wanted to check for herself. She wondered if Jessie and David’s children were all right.
An hour earlier, eight-year-old Ruby Hillier, Nan and Herbert’s daughter, had been doing her homework at the kitchen table. Her brothers Leslie and Lawson sat alongside her: ten-year-old Leslie doing his sums and five-year-old Lawson doodling on a slate. Their uncle Chesley had already put the baby to bed.
All of a sudden Ruby heard a thunderous noise, not unlike the one that had accompanied the earth tremor earlier that evening. Ruby jumped up from her chair and ran to the window where she raised the blind and peered into the dusk. She blinked at the sight that greeted her; it was a white mass tumbling toward her house.
“Oh my!” Ruby cried. “Look at the sheep!”
She was stunned at how fast they were moving. They were half way up the meadow across the road from their house.
Chesley joined his niece at the window.
“I don’t believe they’re sheep,” he said as it dawned on him that his niece had mistaken the foamy whitecaps of the huge waves for sheep. Moments later sea water surrounded the Hillier home.
Then the general panic began. From outside, Ruby heard a roar. Chesley ran into the back bedroom to fetch baby Cyril. With the child in his left arm, Chesley shooed Ruby and the boys out the door. The little group stopped dead at the front door; the porch was filled with frigid water. They stepped gingerly over it and managed to keep their feet dry. Then they rushed up the hill, Uncle Chesley looking behind constantly. He feared another wall of water was on its way.
Near the top of the hill, they met their grandfather, whose face was wet with tears.
“Grandpa, what’s wrong?” Ruby asked. “What’s the matter?”
The old man didn’t answer, but Chesley said, “I don’t know. I suppose he’s confused.”
When the group reached the safety of the high ground, Ruby looked at the village below. It was empty of people, all of whom had rushed to the top of the hill. But the little girl’s face whitened at what she saw. The harbour was blocked with broken boats, stages and flakes that had crashed into the water, and houses that the giant wave had torn down. On top of the hill old Mrs. Walsh stood making the sign of the cross. Her family was gathered around her, intoning the “Hail Marys” of the rosary. Three-yearold Magdalen Walsh sat at her grandmother’s feet; the child was wet to her hips with sea water.
“I’ll never forget this sight,” Ruby told her older brother, Leslie. “I wonder if anyone died.”
Leslie said nothing but bit his bottom lip in response.
As Herbert Hillier made his way up the hill to make sure his four children were safe he made one gasp after another at the destruction that greeted him. Where his father-in-law Henry’s house had stood, there was now a barren space. Herbert stopped in his tracks and looked around; Henry’s stage was gone, too, and so was his store. Even the old man’s fence had disappeared. Herbert was gobsmacked. Henry had lived in that house as long as anyone could remember, for most, if not all, of his sixty-eight years and now there was no evidence that it had even existed.
The hairs on Herbert’s head rose and his body shook. Then his legs began moving again. He had to get up the hill to make sure the children were all right. But then he was struck with a horrific thought: where was Henry? Had he gone to the Temperance meeting that had been planned for this evening? He usually did, he was an active member. And where was Lizzie, Henry’s wife? She was Jessie’s mother, too, and Jessie had left the children with her for the night. Herbert shuddered now as he thought of Jessie and her husband, David Hipditch, racing through the darkness from the Orange Lodge meeting in Lamaline to Point au Gaul.
He plodded on with fear in every step. When he reached his mother’s house he threw the door open to hear wailing. He ran inside and flashed his eyes around to take in each of his children. He let out a whoosh of air when he saw them all, safe and warm. But the tears…
“Nan and Jessie’s mother is dead,” said his own mother. “Washed away.”
“Grandma is gone!” Ruby cried.
“But that’s not the worst of it,” old Mrs. Hillier wailed. “Jessie’s three children are gone.”
Herbert couldn’t move.
“What? The three of them?” he said. “Gone?”
“The three of them, swept away,” his mother answered. “Thomas, Henry, and Elizabeth, the baby that she was still nursing.”
Ruby emitted a great sob.
“What are we going to do, Daddy?” she cried.
Her father’s tongue was thick.
“Well,” he said finally, “we’re going to go home to your mother and help her and Aunt Jessie out.”
He went to the porch to fetch his children’s winter clothes.
Then he turned back to his mother.
“Is Henry all right?” he asked. “Did Henry get swept away too?”
“Well, that’s the only bit of good news,” came the reply. “He was at the Temperance meeting so he’s alive.”
Herbert nodded, though his heart was no lighter.
“Herbert,” his mother said. “There’s more, though.”
Herbert tilted his head in her direction. What else could there possibly be after the disaster of all disasters that had befallen Jessie and David?
“Young Irene is dead, too,” his mother said. “She was down visiting her grandmother, as you know, and she got swept away with her little cousins.”
“Good God,” said Herbert as he envisioned another of Nan’s nieces, the daughter of her other sister, Jemima. “How old was she again?”
“She was eleven,” his mother answered. “Jemima will go mad. Irene was her only daughter with all those boys. Point au Gaul will never be the same after this, Herbert.”
“No,” Herbert said as his children put on their boots. “No.”
Ruby sniffled as she thought of Irene drowning. Irene used to sit behind her in school. The girl was her favourite cousin.
“We’d best get home,” her father said, placing his hand on her shoulder.
“Good night, children,” their only living grandmother called. “God bless you.”
Nan’s grip on her tea cup was tight while she waited for the children. Chesley paced the living room. He knew something of the deaths and destruction that had visited Point au Gaul that night but he didn’t want to be the one to tell Nan; he thought that duty should fall to her husband. He thought also that the family should be together when she was informed of the many likely deaths among her kin. Silence hung heavy as they waited.
Suddenly the door burst open and Nan’s brother, Tom, ran in, his face covered in red patches.
Nan ran out to the porch to meet him.
“What’s wrong, Tom?” she asked, her heart thumping loudly again.
He pulled her to him and sobbed.
“Don’t you know Mother is gone?” he cried. “Father’s home is gone, too!”
Nan drew in air and let it out in a great cry.
“Oh no!” she sobbed. “Oh no!” The tears poured down her face as she and Tom hugged each other like survivors on a raft.
Then Tom told her that their sister Jessie’s children had all been swept away.
Nan howled at the news and fell into a chair. Jemima’s daughter, Irene, was gone as well, he said. She rocked back and forth, her arms folded across her chest.
Then Jessie and David opened the door and came in. Jessie’s clothes were drenched, even her long dark hair was dripping cold water.
“I want my baby,” she said. “My children are gone. I want to know what happened to Thomas and Henry. I’m nursing Elizabeth…”
David stood like a fencepost, his eyes sunken and blank.
“She keeps talking like that,” he said. “And I can’t keep her indoors.”
Nan took Jessie in her arms and for ten long minutes both sisters cried from deep in their bellies. Afterwards it seemed that Jessie’s babbling had ceased. But then she said that she had to nurse Elizabeth. Nan took her upstairs and began to undress her and dry her off.
Downstairs, the men stood in the living room, saying nothing. Before long they heard Jessie scream about her lost children. She demanded to know what had happened to them and why they weren’t safe. When there were silences they knew Nan was talking softly to her. Then Jessie shouted again, wanting to know every detail of how they had been torn from their grandmother’s home and why. David put his hand to his mouth and closed his eyes.
“Sit down, David,” Tom said gently.
Upstairs, Nan begged Jessie to quieten down.
By now, Herbert had returned home with his and Nan’s four children. They sat on the day bed in the kitchen, like ducks in a row, too afraid to move or say anything. Herbert sent Tom to fetch Nan’s father, Henry, so that the old man could be with his daughters and son in his grief.
Soon Henry was sitting in Nan’s kitchen with his grandchildren, listening to Jessie’s mournful cries. After awhile, Ruby went upstairs and sat outside Nan’s room where her Aunt Jessie lay. She crouched down and prayed for her dead cousins but mostly for Aunt Jessie. Now Ruby knew what they meant by the phrase “hell on earth.”
Herbert and Tom settled David in the Hillier kitchen with cups of tea and lassie bread. As he spread the molasses on the bread, Herbert felt guilty that his wife’s kitchen was untouched, that his floors were dry. But there was little time for emotional indulgences. He and Tom quickly went to the porch and put their rubber boots on. They had decided to go out and see what could be done. By now, Herbert deeply regretted going to the Orange Lodge supper in Lamaline when he might have been of some assistance to his own village. There was no way of predicting what would befall Point au Gaul, he knew, but perhaps he shouldn’t have dismissed the earth tremor as he did. It was obvious now that it had something to do with the great waves that had swept houses, fishing rooms, and women and children away.
As he and Tom picked their way through the wreckage that was strewn through Point au Gaul, Tom told him what had happened in his absence. The first wave had rolled in on the flat land of the village and lifted houses and stores off their foundations, smashing them to bits. It swept the entire waterfront clean, carrying virtually everything there out to sea. It was the first wave that had taken Henry and Lizzie Hillier’s house out to sea and with it, Lizzie, and her four grandchildren.
On the opposite end of the beach on a neck of land, the first wave—the one that young Ruby Hillier mistook for sheep—splintered an old two-storey house. Two women, eighty-five-year-old Mary Ann Walsh and sixty-year-old Elizabeth Walsh lived there together. One of the women was killed in the initial crash while the other was pulled out to sea.
“They say Thomas Hillier is missing, too,” Tom said of his neighbour with the same name, the fish oil inspector.
Herbert shook his head.
“He wasn’t even supposed to be home,” Tom continued. “He wanted to come home for his birthday and have a party. It was the first time in his life he ever wanted one, well, since he was a child anyway. Young Caroline was running around earlier talking of how they were making two cakes. She was so excited about it. Now they’re out looking for him. He went out to haul his boat up before the first wave came.”
“How’s Lydia?” Herbert asked of Thomas’ wife.
“Well,” Tom answered, his brow knitted, “she has another baby due soon.”
Herbert shook his head again.
“I’m very sorry for your mother,” he said suddenly.
Tom nodded.
By now they had reached a group of men who were looking for bodies. It was a difficult task given the amount of debris clogging the beach and harbour. They broke into small groups and assigned each other sections of ground to cover. They were confident by now that the erratic tidal action was over and the bright moonlight was helpful to them as they went about their grim task.
Two of the men found Thomas Hillier’s body at ten o’clock. Water-logged and leaden, it took four of them to carry the body to the hall.
“Right where his boat would have been,” said Herbert. “It’s the strangest thing. Was he dragged out and brought back in? Or hit on the head by a piece of wood?”
“There wasn’t a mark on him,” Tom answered. “He obviously stayed out too long. He tried too hard to get his boat to safety.”
“He wasn’t a fisherman,” Herbert muttered. “He wasn’t around the water as much as the rest of us. Perhaps he wasn’t as afraid of it as we are…”
At the hall, pregnant Lydia cried over the body of her husband. She pushed her large tummy to the side and lay her chest and head on him as he reclined lifeless on the table. She could not hear the sobs that rippled through the hall for her and her fatherless unborn child. At her side, her daughter, Caroline, sniffled for the birthday party that would never happen. She kept thinking of an incident from earlier that night. Before supper, her high-spirited father had thrown a stone into a pool of water and splashed mud on his jacket. At home, as the family’s potatoes boiled on the stove top, Caroline had asked him, “Father, may I brush the mud off your jacket?” Thomas had turned to his daughter and answered quietly, “Yes dear, you do that as you may never get the chance again.”
Not long afterwards the men came across the body of Nan’s sixty-six-year-old mother, Lizzie. She was not far along the beach from Thomas Hillier, making the villagers think that she might have died from injuries sustained in the initial crash of the first wave, although there were none visible to the naked eye. Very soon afterwards, Herbert and the other men found the little bodies of Jessie’s three children, Thomas, Henry, and baby Elizabeth. Three-year-old Henry, clad in his pajamas, was lying in the house of a motorized dory trapped in the landwash. His hands were curled around the rails as if he were trying to save himself; it was obvious he had survived the impact of the first wave and was trying his best to live. The men who found him buried their faces in their hands and tried to stifle the sounds of their grief.
After finding the children and bringing them to the hall, the men gave up searching for the night. They knew young Irene Hillier was still out there, and so were the Walsh women, but they were too tired and grief-stricken to continue. They simply could not take anymore.
As the awful day of November 18, 1929 ended, the people of Point au Gaul counted their dead. They began to wonder, too, how many had died in the neighbouring villages and towns along the coast. Many of them had friends and relatives in nearby Lamaline, where Nan and Herbert Hillier and Jessie and David Hipditch had journeyed for their aborted supper at the Loyal Orange Lodge. Mayhem had broken out when Lamaline harbour had emptied of water. Further panic had ensued when the harbour and the lower parts of the village itself had bulged with sea water, the result of a great crush of a wave and then another wave.
Lamaline first appeared in French maps in 1620 as Cap de la Meline. The French name La Maligne, directly translated as “evil” or “wicked,” likely refers to the difficulty of landing a boat in the harbour there because of the many shoals and the low-lying, flat, almost swampy land. In 1763 Captain Cook charted the South Coast of Newfoundland, looking for suitable sites for fishing settlements; one of those chosen was Lamaline.
Despite the early French connection, the first European settlers came from England and Ireland. Lamaline had a significant population by the early 1800s; in 1807, Reverend John Harries of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel baptized seventy-five souls, one-third of whom were adults and “many very old.” Harries was the first clergyman in Lamaline and the only one most of the livyers had ever seen.
Conflict with the French was ongoing. In 1827 the residents of Lamaline appealed to Newfoundland Governor Thomas Cochrane for help, claiming “the French constantly fish on our shore on Sundays (presumably the Newfoundlanders’ day of rest) with boats from sixty to a hundred in number—have taken our dry fish from the beach—have lately burned a boat belonging to one of us and stolen his wharf posts…” Their petition was successful in winning the sympathy of the governor. He immediately dispatched the British naval vessel HMS Manly to patrol the coast. The people of Lamaline sent Cochrane a gift of fish in thanks.
While they portrayed the French as their enemies in this instance, in reality the ties between the two groups were far more complicated than that. Lamaline fishermen sold caplin to the French in contravention of the law. Some tension arose when Captain Alexander Milne of HMS Crocodile discovered the illegal sales as well as considerable smuggling of liquor from St. Pierre to Newfoundland. The French tried to convince him with a taste test that the Newfoundland caplin tasted much better than their own—they failed. All hands breathed sighs of relief when Milne decided not to arrest anyone, but to issue warnings instead. The Loyal Orange Lodge, perched on a hill overlooking Lamaline, was at the centre of social life. Catholics of the town were welcome there, too—in small communities dominated by a harsh North Atlantic environment sectarianism was a luxury they could not indulge. As Jessie, David, Nan, and Herbert fled the hall, they left behind people as dumbfounded and fear-filled as they were. Most of the Lamaline people who had been in the hall left their dinners uneaten and rushed to their homes, heading straight to their children’s bedrooms. They plucked their children from sleep and scurried to higher ground with them.
Twenty-six-year-old Melinda Hillier held her three children close to her as her husband, Frederick, kept a watch on the ocean, waiting for the next wave. Melinda herself could not bear to look. Her ribs rocked as her heart pounded in her chest. Wilomena Emberley, the same age as Melinda, escaped with her brood of five. Like quite a few Lamaline men, Wilomena’s husband, Henry, was in Corner Brook, working on the giant mill and townsite under construction there. It was a great chance to put a few dollars in his pocket. But now, alone with the children, Wilomena ached for him as she watched the first wave batter their house. She knew from the whipping sound the wave made as it hit the dwelling that they wouldn’t sleep there that night and that repairing it would be a real job. As she pushed down her own sob, her youngest started to cry and Wilomena pulled the child to her breast. “Shhh,” she said. “It’ll be all over soon. You’re safe.” Then she bit her own lip so hard it bled.
Jane Hillier’s husband was also at Corner Brook. She had two boys, Fred and Cyril, who fished with their father now, and four younger children. Jane had been terror-struck to see the harbour run dry from her station outside the Hall with her friends and neighbours, who also stood mesmerized. Down below, her oldest sons rushed their younger siblings out of the house, realizing that it was dangerously near the beach and acting on instinct. As their toddler brother, Stanley, ambled out, Fred picked him up under his arm, despite the child’s protests, and pushed each of the other children from behind, trying to hurry them to higher ground. By now, Jane was running toward them.
“Go back up the hill, Mother!” Cyril called. “We’re coming!”
When they reached the top of the hill where Jane stood waiting, glassy-eyed, for her children, the first wave drove in and smashed their house to pieces. Jane let out a wail. When the wave hauled back, Fred saw the fence fall down, the family’s fishing store flow out with the sea, and their trawls and rope unfurl in the water. The cash their father was earning would come in handy, he thought. They would lose just about everything, he knew, including his quintal of Madeira fish. Jane was thinking of the twenty pounds of pork she had stored away and the coal that was meant to keep them warm the winter.
Not far away, on the grasses of the hill, young bride Gertrude Caines felt her face grow hot with tears. She was twenty-one and not long married to Leslie Caines, a thirty-year-old fisherman, who had grievously injured his hand. Leslie was no longer able to fish and Gertrude was wasting away with worry. They had five dollars a week from Public Charities but it was not enough and moreover, it was not what Leslie wanted and certainly not what she wanted. Gertrude spent the entire summer bent over the dark earth, coaxing potatoes, carrots, turnips, beets, and cabbage out of the soil. As the July fog hung, she spread caplin on her garden, having gathered the little fish from the beaches herself. As September approached, she went among her burgeoning crops in the dusk and prayed to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Now, on the night of November 18, 1929, Gertrude knew, all her vegetables were gone.
Two waves had reached into Point au Gaul on the bottom of the Burin Peninsula, swamping the village and taking the lives of Jessie and David’s three young children, Jessie’s mother, Lizzie, the two Walsh women, Thomas Hillier, and young Irene Hillier.
The men of Point au Gaul had recovered most of the bodies under brilliant moonlight the night of the tsunami but some were still missing the next day, including Irene Hillier and Mary Ann Walsh. That same strange night, a horse that had been swept out to sea swam back and walked onto dry land with no ill effects.
On November 19, 1929, the day after the tidal wave, a southeast wind came up. It churned the sea higher and higher, whipping up another panic in the village. The whitecaps brought wreckage back to the beach and right up to the remaining houses. The wind and waves also carried Mary Ann’s body to a small island on the other side of the neck of land on which her house had been situated.
The men and boys scoured the beaches of Point au Gaul but they could not find Irene’s body. Every family prayed that it would be delivered. Irene’s mother, Jemima, could not sleep; night after night she sat up at her bedroom window, listening to the waves and the wind. “It’s awfully cold for Irene out there,” she said repeatedly of her only daughter. Her husband, Joshua, who went to look for Irene at dawn every morning, tried to cajole his wife into bed but she would not rest. “I can’t sleep till she’s found,” Jemima said between her tears.
The bodies were all laid out in the hall, ironically built on high ground. Nan Hillier did not go to see her mother’s body. She did not see Jessie’s children either. “You’ll want to remember them as they are,” Herbert told her. “It’ll be too upsetting to see them any other way.” Besides, Nan was too busy tending to Jessie who still babbled and veered into hysteria.
Now homeless, David and Jessie moved in with Nan and Herbert. David’s dory was swept away, as was his stage and fishing gear. He would have to start his fishing enterprise from scratch. The Hipditches had lost most of their winter provisions as well, but that meant nothing, compared to the loss of their children.
The village held a joint funeral for Lizzie and her four grandchildren, including the missing Irene. But Jemima could find no comfort in the ritual, nor in the constant expressions of sympathy that came from her neighbours in Point au Gaul—not as long as Irene was out there somewhere.
The day after the funeral Lizzie’s spinning wheel, which she had been using the day of the tsunami, washed up on the Point au Gaul beach. It was intact and Nan took it into her own home to keep. A day later, a child playing in a small brook about a hundred yards inland found a prize teapot that Lizzie once owned. The teapot lid was missing but there wasn’t a chip out of the pot.
The newly widowed Lydia Hillier, too, grieved heavily, even as she awaited the birth of her third child. She also faced a practical problem in that the main source of her family income was gone. Her nineteen-year-old stepson, Harold, would have to be the breadwinner now. But Harold’s store and fishing gear had been swept away. And she worried that relations with her stepchildren were not always smooth. This was their house first, Lydia reminded herself worriedly, before she married their father. She reached far inside herself to comfort Caroline who cried ceaselessly for her father. Little Ben was so quiet it worried Lydia. Still a toddler, he was too young for her to know how much he understood. At least I still have my children, Lydia kept telling herself.
Her neighbour, John Walsh, no longer had anything. The sixty-six-year-old bachelor was in poor health but had somehow managed to jog up the hill to safety before the first wave cracked his little dwelling in two. Then it turned the clapboard into splinters and carried it out to sea. John Walsh turned around from the top of the hill with tears streaming down his ruddy fisherman’s cheeks. He had no bed now, he knew, no bedclothes, no sugar or tea, no stove to cook on or keep him warm. He had only the clothes on his back. He saw that, in addition to his house, his stage was demolished. He knew that his trawl lines would be gone, too, as would his 140-fathom, nine-inch manila rope. Where was his boat? He figured that was wrecked too. At his age, he’d have to start all over, somehow. Sixty-eight-year-old Manuel and sixty-one-year-old Jessie Inkpen had spent their whole lives in Stepaside, Burin, a little cove named after the home village of its first English settlers. The Inkpens had prospered and lived in a ten room, three-storey house, built near the water. By November of 1929, Manuel was in poor health and increasingly dependent on Jessie and on Bertha, their live-in maid.
Bertha had gone out visiting for the evening and the couple was having a cup of tea after their supper of fish and brewis when the first wave struck Stepaside. Manuel and Jessie found themselves knee-deep in gelid salt water as they sat at their kitchen table, and stood, shocked at the cold on their legs.
“My God!” Jessie cried.
“We’d best get out,” said Manuel, still holding his cup of tea.
“Shall we bring anything?” Jessie asked. “Shall we put our coats on?”
“I don’t think so, dear,” her husband answered. “I think we better get moving quickly before the water rises up.”
Their legs already numb with cold, they pushed one foot in front of the other, until they reached the back door, the one nearest the kitchen. Jessie, stronger than her husband at this stage in their lives, pushed against it and heaved. It opened and they stepped onto a flake, their own.
“It seems steady,” she said to Manuel. “Come on.”
She regretted listening to Manuel and not taking his cane.
As soon as the elderly couple stood on the flake it pushed off from the shore and floated to sea.
“Good God!” said Manuel.
Jessie’s face whitened. Her eyes scanned the village. Flakes and stages were destroyed. Dories were bottom up or cut in two as if giant knives had come down from the heavens. Cords of firewood drifted alongside the flake that had become their raft. Were they going to die like this? Jessie decided she had to do something.
“Help!” she cried. “Someone help us!”
“Help!” Manuel joined her.
“Don’t strain yourself, dear,” Jessie said gently. She worried about the effect of this on his health. She never imagined they’d be floating out in the bay on a flake in November.
“Help!” she yelled again.
Men began appearing from the houses on the high ground. Jessie saw them point to the old couple on the flake in the middle of the cove. In spite of her predicament, she almost smiled.
Manuel was looking behind them, out to sea.
“I wonder will there be another flood?” he said.
“Hush, now,” Jessie answered. “Our neighbours are on their way to rescue us. See how they’re getting a dory out?”
Manuel nodded. He had begun to shiver. Jessie, too, was chilled and could not feel her feet. Then the water began to rise again and the boards of the flake began to creak. The swell broke the flake in two, throwing Manuel and Jessie into the sea. Jessie screamed and trod water madly, trying to find bottom. Manuel was too stunned to speak but his feet, as numb as they were, found the sea floor. He raised a frozen arm to grab hold of Jessie but she was too far away, still screaming. Then she stopped.
“I’m all right!” she called out. “I can stand up! On my toes!”
“My God!” said Manuel. How long could they last like this? The sight of his wife’s face pointed at the sky, her hair covered in cold ocean water, tore at him.
“Hold onto a plank,” Manuel cried. “It’ll keep you afloat.”
He saw Jessie clutch one and gasp in relief as she did so.
“Are they still coming?” she called.
“They are,” said Manuel. “They’re almost here.”
Two Stepaside men hauled Jessie first and then Manuel into the dory when it arrived alongside the flake. The men rowed quickly to the beach, casting worried glances at their frozen passengers. Then they carried the Inkpens ashore and up a steep bank to a large house where most of their neighbours fearfully waited for more flooding.
Bertha was already there when Jessie and Manuel were carried in.
“A fine night for a cruise,” the maid said, her face wet with tears.
“Terrible flooding,” Manuel said, his face grey. “Our kitchen floor is all wet.”
“Mr. Inkpen,” said Bertha. “Didn’t you see the big wave? It was monstrous. Sure, it took all the stages and flakes out!”
As the women took off Jessie’s stockings and slippers and dried her feet, one of the men said, “The big wave is after receding again and will be back again soon. All the houses and everything on lower ground is in danger of being swept away.”
“Oh my goodness,” said Jessie. “I didn’t realize it was that bad.”
“It’s just as well you didn’t,” said Bertha. “There’d be no point to it, the situation you were in.”
The women took blankets off the stove and wrapped Manuel and Jessie in them. They pushed hot toddies into their hands and urged them to drink.
“Here it comes!” someone called from the window. “Here comes the wave!”
The villagers rushed outdoors to watch the wall of water crush the Inkpens’ home and virtually every stage and flake in Stepaside. The roar startled Manuel this time and the reality of his experience caused his heart to flutter and pearls of sweat to pour down his face. Still seated, he grabbed Jessie’s hand. Besides their house, furniture, linen, crockery, and clothing, the sea took Manuel’s wharf, barn, two stores, and fishing gear. The old couple’s sheep and ten hens drowned as well.
When Manuel learned all this after the second wave pulled back, he sobbed into Jessie’s breast.
“I’m too old for this,” he cried.
Sarah Rennie of Lord’s Cove fed her youngest children, Rita, Patrick, Margaret, and Bernard, their supper. They gobbled down their vegetables—hers were good eaters, not like some children in the village, thank God—and happily chewed their salt fish. They knew some lassie bread was waiting if they ate it all, that was her promise.
Sarah kept some potatoes, carrots, and fish in the pot for her husband, Patrick, and her older sons, Martin and Albert. She hadn’t expected them home, this being a special night for the Lord’s Cove men to get together for cards. Every bit of time away from work was deserved for them; for her, too, when it came, as it occasionally did. Patrick’s two missing fingers were testimony to his own diligence. She knew she wouldn’t see him till the wee hours. She expected the boys home much earlier than that, though. Albert had school tomorrow, she had reminded him as they headed out with their father.
“Don’t be late now,” she had said.
Four-year-old Margaret had barely swallowed her lassie bread when her head began to loll.
“Upstairs for you, little maid,” Sarah said, gathering the child in her arms. When she came downstairs from tucking her youngest daughter in her cot, Sarah returned to her sewing machine. Baby Bernard was still not tired—he rarely was, Sarah sighed—so she secured him in his high chair and gave him his rattle again. “Bababa,” he said as he banged it on the wooden tray.
“You two should get at your lessons now” Sarah said to Rita and young Patrick, running a line of blue thread into the bobber on her Singer.
Just then the sound of thunder drowned out her children’s responses and Sarah’s skirts were anchored in icy water. She screamed, her eyes wide in horror. Sarah could not scream again because she was suddenly immersed in a mountainous wave. Her house was borne out on the water, heading for the Atlantic. Then the wave returned and threw it into the middle of The Pond with a great heartless thud.
The noise had drawn Patrick Rennie from Prosper Walsh’s house and he now stood on a hill above the village with his heart ripped in two. “My wife and children are in there!” he screamed, tearing the lining of his throat.
“They’re all drowned,” one fisherman whispered to another.
“Yes, they’d have to be,” his friend agreed grimly.
The men put their arms around Patrick’s strong shoulders, but then he disappeared like a shot, followed by his sons, Martin and Albert. All three ran toward The Pond, stopping abruptly at the shore.
“Sarah!” Patrick called out.
“Mom!” the boys cried. “Mom! Rita!”
“Sarah, answer me! Sarah!”
But there only came silence. Behind them the harbour was empty of sea water, its rocky bottom entirely exposed. The moon was luminous, throwing whiteness throughout the village.
Patrick ran back and forth on the shore of The Pond. Like most fishermen, he could not swim; there had never been any time for such leisure in the summer. He tore at his hair. The meaning of the silence ate into him, devouring his soul.
“Sarah!” he cried.
“Get out of there!” someone called suddenly.
Martin glanced at the dry harbour bottom and realized that another wave might be on its way.
“Come on, Dad,” he said firmly, taking his father by the elbow. The boy had no intention of losing his father. Slowly and in a stupor Patrick backed away from The Pond. But as he walked up the hill, he kept looking back at what was now the graveyard of his family.
For the past five years, eighteen-year-old Mary Walsh of Lord’s Cove had worked in a hotel in St. Pierre during the winter and spring and helped a French woman there raise her three children. Every summer she returned home to make fish for her father. Mary’s mother had died not too long before from an illness that had plagued her for years, leaving Mary and her younger brother, Bertram, motherless. Like most Roman Catholics, Mrs. Walsh had left this life with a lighted candle in her clasped hands, supported by the loving hands of a stronger relative. Mary’s mother had expired before the candle had burned more than an inch down. It was a memory that seared Mary’s young brain.
That year, 1929, Mary was late going back to St. Pierre, so on a November night she saw the rocky harbour bottom for the first time in her life.
“Pop!” she called out from the front porch. “There’s no water in the cove. It’s all rocks.”
“What?” her father, Jim, answered incredulously.
“Come and see!” Mary insisted.
As soon as her father joined her in the doorway, they saw the first wave coming. All around them, people were running around shouting frantically. The wave seemed as if it was coming from the sky, it was so high. As it came closer, it seemed to pick up speed. Its nasty edge was unmistakable.
Mary’s head spun round when her father ran back into the house and upstairs. She fought back panic. Everyone else was running away from their houses to higher ground. Mary stood frozen to the linoleum in the porch, her breathing shallow. What should she do? What was her father doing?
Then Jim rushed back down the stairs, his footfalls heavy on the steps. In his hands was the candle that had led Mary’s mother to the afterlife. Mary’s eyes glistened with moisture, the roar of the wave outside almost forgotten. Wordlessly, Jim jumped into his boots and went out to the bank where the capstan was and stuck the candle down in a piece of chain. Mary watched him light it and back away. Then he turned and ran, grabbed his daughter, and rushed her to the hills above the village.
As the second wave hit Lord’s Cove, the candle remained lit, a tiny fleck of light surrounded by wild waves that somehow did not come close to it. The little light did not go out even as the third wave roared into the beach and demolished flakes, stages, dories, skiffs, and houses.
The tsunami did untold damage in Lord’s Cove, affecting virtually every family. The men wondered how they would fish next spring. Tusa Chappalla, John Collier, Francis Ferrie, David Fitzpatrick, James Fitzpatrick, Thomas Hodge, and William Lamb were among the many whose stages were ripped to bits by the waves. Other fishermen—Martin Fitzpatrick, Clement Harnett, John Herlidan, Frederick Hennebury, Clotaire Isaacs, and Eugene Papail among them— lost their dories and trap skiffs as well as their stages and stores.
The women saw that from now on even curing fish would be a problem, since some of beaches were washed away. One of these belonged to Prosper Walsh, who had done so much to warn people of the coming disaster. Prosper, with a wife and four dependent children, had built up his eight foot high beach with a wooden and rock breakwater, costing him $150.00. The tsunami washed it all away. Even more worrying, the giant waves seemed to have robbed the forty-six-year-old man of his eyesight. As the last wave receded, so did Prosper’s vision, so that from then on he saw everything through a blur.
Upstairs in the Rennie house, four-year-old Margaret had been slipping into the heaviness of nighttime sleep when the first wave approached. She lazily turned her head on the pillow her mother, Sarah, had puffed up for her, and glanced at the lamp that burned at the head of the stairs. Then the house shook as if ten gales were bearing down on it and the lamp went out. Margaret felt the shock of a frigid wetness and then nothing.
The three waves that slammed into Lord’s Cove were between sixteen and fifty feet high. They hit the harbour at almost 130 kilometres an hour, clearing the little cove of everything it had held.
The Rennie house, containing Margaret, her mother, Sarah, and siblings Rita, Patrick, and Bernard, was dragged into the harbour and then thrown back into The Pond, where it now lay, halfsubmerged. Patrick Sr., Sarah’s husband, howled, half-mad, at the top of the hill, where his friends had led him. His surviving sons, Martin and Albert, stood hollow-faced by his side, too stunned to speak. Every few minutes Albert balled his hands and rubbed his eyes as if he could change the sight in front of him by doing so.
After the third wave the sea returned to its pre-tsunami calmness, the very state that had deceived them so. The moon enveloped the still cove in a light that seemed strangely protective, though it revealed the splinters that had been stages and flakes and now clogged up the harbour. When an hour had passed with no sign of another wave, Patrick’s friend, John Joe Fitzpatrick, turned to him and said, “I think we’ll try and get to your house.”
Another neighbour, Herb Fitzpatrick, nodded in agreement.
“It’s calm now, Pat,” he said. “And I expect it’ll stay that way.”
“We’ll do what we can, Pat,” John Joe added.
He patted Martin and Albert on the shoulders as he began to move down the hill, Herb by his side.
“Mind your old man, boys,” he called back.
Martin and Albert closed in on their father. They were still numb with shock themselves.
As they neared The Pond, the men met Jim Walsh, who had lost virtually nothing to the waves, thanks to his wife’s death candle. Jim had just come from Fred Hennebury’s property where the two men had tried in vain to recover the bodies of Hennebury’s sheep. The animals had been swept away by one of the waves and then pushed under a fishing store on the next incoming wave. They were barred in by a boat that got jammed there by the final wave. All the sheep drowned.
Jim was desperate to help his neighbours, but was at a loss as to how. Herb and John Joe told him they needed a boat to put in The Pond to go out to the Rennie house.
“Mine is all in one piece,” Jim said. “We just have to get it hauled over there.”
Adrenalin pumped through the men’s veins as they lugged the dory across the beach and over the scrap of land to The Pond. Other fishermen carried the oars. Then the three of them, John Joe, Jim, and Herb, jumped into the dory and rowed to the house tilting in the water, their hearts galloping in fear. When they reached it they saw that the cold water came up to the ceiling of the first floor. From the shore of The Pond, they heard a woman scream.
Suddenly, the house rose up as if to make their task easier. Pond and sea water drained out of it, followed by pots, pans, and even table legs. Then they saw the high chair, horizontal and still holding baby Bernard. John Joe reached in the broken window and pulled the chair toward the dory, trying to keep as steady as he could. The sound of his own breathing was all he could hear as he cut the child from the chair and passed him to Herb, who had removed his coat to wrap little Bernard in. They found Rita next, and then her brother, Patrick. Their mother, Sarah, was under the kitchen table, next to the sewing machine—it seemed she did not even have time to move away from her perch.
Only young Margaret was missing. The men could see clearly through the first floor of the house and she was not there. They decided to row back to shore with their sad, sad cargo.
As villagers carried the Rennie family bodies out of Jim Walsh’s dory, sobs rang through the harbour. In the hall on top of the hill that marks the western entrance to Lord’s Cove, women were already preparing a long table to receive the bodies of Sarah and her children for waking. Their husbands would gather enough planks to make one large and four smaller coffins.
Patrick Rennie had joined the crowd on the shore of The Pond by now. He covered his mouth as he saw the remains of his wife and children lovingly placed in blankets to be taken to the hall.
“Where’s Margaret?” he said.
John Joe, Herb, and Jim looked at each other, not knowing what to say.
“We have to have Margaret,” Patrick persisted.
Wordlessly, the three men re-entered Jim’s dory and rowed back out to the house. The moon seemed even brighter now, if that were possible. They circled the Rennie dwelling, contemplating their next move.
“She might be at the bottom of The Pond, the poor little thing,” Herb said.
“I don’t think so,” said Jim, though he didn’t know where this thought came from.
Then John Joe’s face lit up.
“I know! She’s upstairs!” he cried. “She’s upstairs!”
Over the next half hour, they got another dory into The Pond and used pressure to sink the house again so that the floor of the second storey was level with the water. Then they saw the cot where Margaret would surely be found. It was covered in chocolate-coloured mud and seaweed.
“I’ll go in and get her little body,” Jim said.
“Tread carefully,” Herb cautioned. “Or the whole house will go topsy-turvy.”
Jim reached into the crib, pushed away the debris the ocean had churned up, and took the little girl’s body. As he carried her to the dory, he thought he heard her sigh. He looked at her face and thought she was a bit pink for a child who had drowned. Perhaps… He rushed her to the small boat and the waiting men.
“I think she might be alive!” he said excitedly.
Herb and John Joe crowded in on Margaret. They peeled off their coats and wrapped them around the child as tightly as they could. Jim rocked her and blew hot air on her face as the other two men rowed as fast as they could. Once onshore he ran with her in his arms to John Joe’s house.
“I think she’s alive!” he cried, hurrying past a row of anxious people in the hallway. “Get some warm water! Quick!”
When Alberta Fitzpatrick eased Margaret into the tub of warm water the child suddenly woke and screamed. At the sound of her voice, everyone in the house, and then Lord’s Cove itself, made the joyful noise their hearts had longed to make. Their child had been saved.
Ben and Beatrice Hollett had watched open-mouthed on the shore of Kelly’s Cove as the giant wave reached in and picked up their neighbour’s house and carried it out to sea. Inside, Carrie Brushett and her five children felt as if the house were flying and Carrie had somehow gathered her brood together and shielded them behind a window curtain she kept tightly closed. The men on the beach were still slack-jawed when, as they stood immobile in shock, the Brushett house returned on another wave—intact, its curtains still pulled together, displaying Carrie’s usual neat housekeeping. Then, plop! The rush of seawater plunked it on the beach a hundred yards in front of them. Their chests heaved great sighs of relief when they heard Carrie’s cries for help and the wails of her youngest. Ben bolted and ran to the nearest house for a ladder; he knew the first floor would be full of frigid water and that they’d be on the second floor. The men had also watched the first great wave snatch the Kelly home. Vincent Kelly had built the white two-storey home for his bride, Frances, some fifteen years before. It was near the water on a rocky, exposed patch of land. Since then, the Kellys had had four children: Marion, who was thirteen in November, 1929; Curtis, twelve; Dorothy, and the smallest child, Elroy. Like many Burin Peninsula women, Frances kept chickens, eggs being a good source of protein and essential for the cakes that everyone looked forward to at Christmas and for their birthdays; she had six hens in her chicken house.
Like most men in the area, forty-five-year-old Vincent had done well in the shore fishery the past few years. The Kellys were able to buy eight gallons of molasses, which the children loved to spread on the bread their mother made every day. They also had twelve quintals of salt fish stored in their pantry, a barrel of flour, a hogshead of salt, and a quarter barrel of beef, a favourite meat that they didn’t get to eat too often. Alongside the house, Vincent had built a barn to store hay—he had plenty cut in 1929—for his few head of cattle in the winter, and the coal he’d got for the coming cold months.
With Vincent’s extra earnings from the successful shore fishery of the past few years, Frances had bought another Singer sewing machine. She had two now; one for her and one for her daughters, Marion and Dorothy. Already Marion was becoming an accomplished seamstress, while Dorothy was eagerly turning her hand to learning the skills from her mother and sister. She was working on pillow cases, a project that would allow her to master straight lines before she tackled more complicated tasks. She looked forward to making dresses like her mother did. Dorothy marvelled when she thought of how Frances had made her own wedding dress. Once in awhile, Frances took her daughters upstairs to her bedroom closet and released the dress from its wrapping and mothballs so that the girls could ooh and aah at it. Frances smiled at their wide eyes; she knew it gave them something to aim for.
Meanwhile, she made sure her family had the finest wardrobe in the harbour; nothing suited a lady better than lovely clothes, as her own mother had told her. Making them was an act of artistry. With the cottons, flannels, and even muslin she collected, she made fine clothes for her children and the sons and daughters of her neighbours in the cove. Little Marjorie Willis, five now, was christened in a white lace gown that Frances had sewn. Ben Hollett’s teenage daughters had long, full skirts that Frances made for them. The skirts made their debut at Lady Day in Oderin that August, when the whole bay, Catholic and Protestant alike, gathered to celebrate the feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary and share food, drink, laughter, and stories. Frances had made a Lady Day hat for Martha Cooper, another Kelly’s Cove teenager, who had confided to Frances her affection for one of the Oderin boys. Martha had gone into Path End, where she’d bought a straw hat; then Frances sewed layers of violet lace onto the brim. Frances made cotton shirts for the five children of her friend, Carrie Brushett, too; she knew Carrie had her hands full, and for the young son of her neighbours, the Footes. Thus, on Sunday, all the children of Kelly’s Cove wore something made by Frances Kelly.
Like Sarah Rennie in Lord’s Cove, Frances Kelly had been hard at work with her Singer sewing machine when she felt the rumbling of the earth beneath her. Her foot stopped its almost incessant action on the pedal and she looked up from the machine, fixing her eyes on the kitchen wall opposite. There she saw the kerosene lamp flicker wildly—she lit it at four o’clock every day—and dishes rattle manically. Then she heard the kettle on the stove jump. She creased her brow. She had never experienced anything like this before.
Dorothy had been running her yellow cotton pillow case through the girls’ sewing machine. She, too, stopped her work at the sudden eruption of noise and trembling.
“What’s that, Mommy?” she asked. She was more curious than afraid.
At first Frances said nothing. She tried to move her mouth but it was as if her tongue was weighed down by sand. She shook her head as if that would clear the odd sensation away. Then she opened her mouth as if to spit out the feeling of sand. “Pphhh!” she said and found some relief with the gesture. Then she turned to her daughter.
“I just don’t know what that strange thing is, child,” she said. She saw that Dorothy’s face was turning red, as if she were holding her breath. “But it can’t go on too much longer,” she added.
“No, Mommy,” Dorothy said. The little girl had stood up when the rumbling started but now she sat down at her sewing machine again. The red drained out of her face and she began to wait patiently, reassured by her mother’s words. As the two of them sat there, the dishes, cups and the kettle on the stove continued their odd little jig. The lamp flickered crazily but did not go out.
About five minutes later, the earth became still again. Dorothy and Frances said nothing but let out great gulps of air. It was awhile before they brought their hands back to the cloth and sewing machines.
Frances’ older daughter, Marion, was at another house in the village, writing a letter for an old lady who could not write but wanted to send a message to her sister in Boston. Marion wanted to go home when she felt the shock but she stayed put; she would finish the letter and then go—her parents had imbued a strong sense of duty in their children. After Marion signed the old lady’s name to the white sheet and folded it, she threw her coat over her shoulders and ran to the Kellys’ as if the wind were pushing her.
At the family supper that followed, all the talk was about “the big rumbling,” as young Curtis called it. Dorothy could almost laugh about it now that they were altogether—well, most of them; their father, Vincent, had sailed across to the peninsula, his objective to get a full load of wood for the winter. He would be gone for at least a week, probably closer to two weeks. Between his bites of cabbage and fish cakes, Curtis kept making funny noises, imitating the earth and the sounds it had made. It was an earthquake, a neighbour had told him, an earthquake in some far off place. Although they had felt it here in Newfoundland, it was nothing for them to worry about; these things reverberated from quite a distance.
Although she could laugh about it with her brothers and sister, Dorothy still had a bad feeling deep in her belly. Marion felt as if ladybugs were crawling up her chest as she did her English homework at the kitchen table and wrote out the assigned sentence: “If you do not leave the house, I will send for the policeman with that fine.”
After the children finished their homework, Dorothy washed her long blond hair in the wash basin and, while it was still damp, Marion and Frances tied it in a chaotic pattern of red rags. When it dried, they would free it from the rags and it would be full of “glorious curls,” as the magazines promised.
As they finished tying Dorothy’s hair, Curtis went out to play. Curtis, who had the energy of a workhorse, begged his mother for another hour or so out of doors before bedtime. The youngest Kelly child, three-year-old Elroy, begged to go with him.
“All right,” Frances said to Curtis, finally giving in. “Stay in the meadow on top of the hill near your aunt’s house and don’t wander into the woods. The fairies are on the lookout for children after dark. But, Elroy, you stay here with us. You’re too young yet.”
“Take some bread for your pockets, Curtis,” said Marion. She was already tearing tiny cubes off the remains of the day’s loaf.
“That’s right,” Frances echoed. “That’ll keep you safe from the fairies.”
Curtis rolled his eyes. He wanted to be a soldier when he grew up and he wasn’t afraid of fairies. “I’m going to play armies,” he said. “The fairies will be frightened of me, not the other way around.”
“You take it and listen to your sister anyway,” his mother said, pushing a red wool cap over his head. “Go on now.”
Frances and Dorothy returned to their sewing machines. Curtis barely had time to reach the top of the hill when they heard the roaring of a wave. Marion ran into the yard to see a mountain of a wave slowly approaching them. She scooped Elroy up in her arms and hopped over the fence that separated the Kellys’ fence from their neighbours’. When she looked back, her family’s house was off its foundation and was just going out to sea.
Gelid salt water had flooded it. The wave lifted Dorothy from her chair and Frances from hers, swallowing them whole. For a minute Dorothy could see her mother’s blue dress and white apron. She stretched her hands as far as they could go and kicked her legs in a bid to reach Frances, but then her mother disappeared. Bubbles came out of her mouth, big ones and then small ones. She felt dizzy and she couldn’t breath. She had to get to her mother. She’d be safe then. But she couldn’t see Frances anymore.
Dorothy kept moving through the water and her head hit something solid. It was the ceiling of the first floor of their house. Oddly, it didn’t hurt and she could breath now; she’d reached an air pocket. She gulped huge mouthfuls of air and tried to tread water, like they did in the ponds in summer. For the first time she realized the water was cold and it hit her—this was sea water, not freshwater. The ocean had rushed into their house. She shook her head as if doing so would wake her out of a horrible dream. Where was her mother?
She plunged under the water again, looking for the blue and white of her mother’s clothing, but everything was grey and dark. And it was moving. The house was moving. The waves had taken the house off its foundation and, Dorothy suddenly realized, hauled it out to sea. She thought of her neighbours on shore; surely they could see this and were putting their boats out to rescue her and her mother. She knew that her father and Vincent Brushett were away, but Billy Foote, Ben Hollett, and a few other men were home. It did not occur to her yet that their houses might be swept away, also.
She pulled her head above the water. The red rags in her hair had come unfurled and had dropped into water like long ribbons of blood. Dorothy began shivering. I must not panic, she thought. She tried to move along the ceiling, trying to find the staircase so she could get to the second storey. It’ll be dry upstairs, she reasoned. Maybe Mommy is already up there.
It was hard to move along. The water dragged her down like it was quicksand. Her legs felt like they were made of stone. The lamp had long gone out and the blackness of the night was total now. She didn’t know which way to turn. She bit her lip and tried not to cry. Her mother and father would not want her to panic, she reminded herself. They’d want to be proud of her when this is all over. She crept along in the darkness, fighting off a feeling of sleepiness.
“Mommy!” she called out, figuring the shouting might keep her awake and help her rescuers find her.
“Mommy! Where are you? I’m here!”
There was no answer. There was no noise, save the slosh of the waves inside the little house and Dorothy’s cries. It seemed now that the house was moving faster, though she didn’t know in what direction. Maybe it will be put back in Kelly’s Cove, she thought, and all this will be over. But it was as if something was carrying the house a long, long way.
Then the frigid water rose up to the ceiling and Dorothy was covered in it again. Her arms and legs flailed about desperately as she fought off panic. With her hands she hit chairs and table legs and the walls of the family kitchen. Maybe the other houses in Kelly’s Cove are gone, too, she thought.
Then she was in the open ocean, just drifting like seaweed. She wasn’t cold anymore and, as it enveloped her, the sea began to give a comfort that felt familiar but that she could not recall exactly. The heaviness she had felt in the house had given way and her body was as light as a feather. She lazily opened her eyes and watched lobsters crawl, fish fly by, an eel scoot. It was all so beautiful.
As Dorothy sailed through the waters of the bay, she saw a light that had the brilliance of the finest cut diamond. She floated toward it, overwhelmed by its intensity. All around the light were thick glowing arms that reached for her. They called her name and pulled her to them. Without hesitation, Dorothy fell into their embrace and bathed in their warmth. At once, she felt a love even greater than the great love she had known in her short life as Frances’ beloved daughter in Kelly’s Cove, Newfoundland.